Patient monitoring is a fundamental tool of the care team at White Memorial Medical Center

Sep 25, 2015 Awards & Recognition

As a major, regional teaching hospital in Greater Los Angeles, White Memorial Medical Center is a 353-bed institution playing an important role training physicians, nurses and other health professionals. I have been a Respiratory Care Practitioner (RCP) since 1983. In my early years of practice, pulse oximetry was considered the save all system to use to monitor patients to prevent any hypoxic events from occurring. While pulse oximetry is indeed very good and has become a universally acceptable process for monitoring for patients, it has, in my opinion, given room for error in how one may think a patient's true condition is.

For the RCP, we know that pulse oximetry should only be used to indicate a patient's oxygenation status and that it is only accurate to the point of how well perfused the site is where the probe is placed.